


In which Cabal contemplates Insomnia

by Raspberry_bby



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: F/M, Help, It got away from me ok?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-05 17:04:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15867936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raspberry_bby/pseuds/Raspberry_bby
Summary: A present! For all the lovely tales, I offer a story inside a story. It's not nearly as saucy as the original, but then again, when is Johannes known for his sauciness? That's Horst's job.





	In which Cabal contemplates Insomnia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CynaraM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynaraM/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Leonie Dreamed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4944868) by [CynaraM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynaraM/pseuds/CynaraM). 



Johannes Cabal rarely dreamed. Or rather, he did, but he treated everything his subconscious mind tossed his way with the same air of irritated dismissal that he gave everything else that didn’t concern his direct wellbeing—and some things that did.

However. In recent months, his subconscious mind, after nearly thirty years of throwing things at the walls of his psyche finally seemed to have found something that stuck.

Of course, it was Leonie Barrow. Of course, now that his mind had found something that actually counted as a dream and not a mild inconvenience, it was the only thing that would appear as soon as he drifted off. Of course, he had no armor against it.

Cabal had tried to fend off the attacks from his subconscious; working, he was sure, in tandem with his baser urges in whatever nearly forgotten corner they had scuttled off to in recent years. So far, he had not been successful. Which was surprising, given his affinity for both mental gymnastics and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.

And yet still his drifting mind was assaulted by wild clouds of golden hair and sharp looks; by acidic remarks and  breathless kisses huddled in cramped alcoves as some eldritch monstrosity patrolled by outside. By the very specific pattern of sun-stained skin on a bare shoulder. It was an affront to everything he had cultivated his perfectly disciplined mind to be. It was one thing to dream about someone he loved, someone he very much wished to hold again, to see alive and glowing and well. It was another thing entirely when the lips opened, and a completely different voice came out and his dreaming mind didn’t seem to care about the difference. It was embarrassing, vulgar— this was Miss Barrow.

 _Leonie,_ his subconscious reminded him, leering at him from behind its vault door.

But try as he might, Johannes Cabal had no defenses for this particular assault. And so he endured it with as much poise as his ruffled pride could muster. Which is to say, none.

 

It was with some relief then, that he found himself disturbed from an id-laden dream involving the woman sleeping next to him. Well, he corrected himself sharply—not _like that._ She was, for example, not tucked up under his arm, as she had permitted once before in the Dee Society dungeons. Rather, she was a good six inches away from him, within reach to grab if an expeditious getaway was necessary, but firmly within her own space. Of this, he was glad. He was unsure if he could muster up the strength to roll her away from him if she had moved much closer in her sleep.

Cabal propped himself up on his elbows, contemplating trying to get a few hours more sleep before waking Miss Barrow and continuing on their way through the catacombs. But what had awoken him in the first place?

The question was quickly answered. Beside him, Leonie twitched in her sleep, her boot scraping against the stone, sending leaden echoes through the alcove they were camped in. Ah. Well. That answered that then. Nothing to be overly concerned about, really. Cabal settled back as best he could against the floor and closed his eyes, hands resting across his stomach, hoping against hope that he would not be subjected to any further depravities from his mutinous brain.

He was just drifting off against the comforting swell of the noble gasses when another sound snapped him back to wakefulness. It was a strange sound, a whining kind of gasp, sharp and surprised. He furrowed his brow at the ceiling of the tunnel as the sound was repeated: a gasp, and then a long exhalation of breath.

It was coming, he realized, from Leonie. Her back was to him, but he turned his head in the hopes of appraising the nature of the sound.

She rolled tighter in on herself, nearly in the fetal position. Her skirt had hiked up in the night, revealing the curved expanse of her left calf. He averted his eyes. She was having a nightmare, obviously. Most likely about the thing that had sent them scurrying down here in the first place, all shadowed tendrils and flickering eyes. The tunnels had seemed a better option than trying to creep quietly around it to the front door. That was before he had realized how expansive the tunnels really were.

Cabal contemplated shaking Miss Barrow, rousing her from the dream. It would do neither of them any favors to have her whimpers of fear attracting the attentions of anything lurking in the tunnels with them.

Yet if he woke her, she might make even more of a clatter than if he left her to dream. She, unlike himself, did not know how to control the shock of sudden wakefulness. He’d shaken her from slumber once to run from a sinister non-Euclidean collection of wailing horrors, and she’d nearly given him a black eye.

Cabal was just deciding that waking someone from an unpleasant dream was something that _friends_ were supposed to do—and if nothing else, he should give her a kick to see if she would wake up more delicately that way; without direct threat to his physical well-being— when Leonie Barrow shifted her hips and _moaned._

He stilled, staring at her. There was no other way to describe it. A rushing sound rose in his ears and she made the ungodly sound again, deep in her throat. A kind of murmur that rose from the space at the bottom of her lungs and up past her lips.

He swallowed. Still madly hoping that she was having a nightmare. Nightmares he could deal with; he had a certain expertise in dealing with nightmares that he was rather proud of. But this... this was something else entirely.

Her breath came faster, short little gasps that shook her shoulders, and Cabal found himself rooted to the spot with something that felt like fear. Fear, and a sudden tightness in his abdomen. He sat up, eyes fixed on her shoulders as she shifted to roll half onto her stomach, one leg extending until he could see a cluster of freckles on the back of her thigh.

This was truly embarrassing. She would hate him for the rest of non-linear time if she knew that she was making these sounds and he had not spared her pride and woken her. And yet he could not now shake her awake and say that he thought she had been having a nightmare because he could _feel_ the flush that was even now creeping up his cheeks and into his ears and she would know, she would _know_ he was lying and then that would make everything worse. It was utterly mortifying. This was not, would never be, something he ever wanted to know.

He resolved himself to ignore her entirely. To shut her out and go wander the tunnels until her fit was over. But what if she woke and he was gone? She would undoubtedly come barreling through the catacombs until she found him, making all kinds of racket and panicking in a way that he was fairly certain would result in her not talking to him for several months afterwards. He had left off on a particularly vicious chess move, and was eager to continue the game with all speed. Her ire would put a damper on that plan entirely.

And so, he stayed where he was. Pinned by embarrassment and some other emotion he absolutely refused to examine.

What was worse was that he found himself wondering who she was dreaming about.

He tried to put that thought down firmly, with three precise, mental bullets: _You don’t care, You don’t want to know,_ and _Definitely not you, that is absolutely certain._ It rose past his frantic shots like a shoggoth, completely disregarding all previously iron-clad mental defenses.

Rory. There had been a Rory on her arm fairly recently, he thought. At least, she had ribbed him gently about Rory a few weeks prior. It was not quite that Leonie Barrow _went through_ men, but she certainly didn’t keep them around if she wasn’t happy with them. She had said something about having lost 86 kilograms when he had appeared in Penlow to drag her off on this adventure that he had been entirely baffled by. She didn’t have 86 kilograms to spare, did she? Now he was beginning to think she had been _alluding_ to something, which he hated. She knew how much he disliked metaphor.

Leonie pillowed her head on her arm and sighed, the breath rattling out from her lungs. Her foot twitched again, she whimpered in her throat.

Cabal stared resolutely at the wall.

He tried to justify the sounds she was making as anything other than... than _that_.  He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to ignore that his trousers were by now very tight, tried to drown out the maddening little noises by reciting his former life plan. Again. From the top. He was just running through his apprenticeship with the solicitors when she sighed again and this time, there was a mumbled word hidden at the core.

_“Joh...nes...”_

His heart stopped entirely, painfully, slammed back into motion like a broken automaton. His eyes flew open, he stared at her in shock. All of the color drained out of his face. His hands felt clammy. His mouth was suddenly very dry.

Oh no.

That was wrong. He had misheard, obviously. She had not, in fact, said anything. He…he was hearing things. He had been doing _so well_ not encouraging himself. Not fixing her hair when it was tousled, not staring overlong at her mouth when she was concentrating, remaining as stoic as possible when she came close to bandage him after some ridiculous stunt that had frankly, not been entirely necessary.

There would be no coming back from this, even if she _had_ said nothing at all. Cabal shifted uncomfortably where he sat. He exhaled through his nose, there was no way in any circle of hell that he could wake her up now, not in his condition. And she would now most certainly strike him out of embarrassment, because conscious Leonie would _never_ entertain such a notion. He clung to the safety of her disinterest and tried to master himself.

 

It was not so out of the ordinary for people to have _dreams_ was it? Especially when two people happened to spend copious amounts of time in each other’s company. Dreams reflected the waking world in many little dishonest ways. One might even dream of marrying the greengrocer if one spent enough time with him.

Cabal shook his head. Even he knew that he was grasping at straws. _He_ had never dreamt about marrying the greengrocer, despite seeing the man every two weeks.

Leonie sighed and Cabal screwed up his face, pinned between the desire to just kick her awake and get it over with and the whispers from his traitor of a subconscious reveling in his discomfort and arousal. Hadn’t he dreamt about those very sounds? About how her hips would move? Her breath leaving her in tight gasps? Hadn’t he wondered? No, he lied, he had not. Not now, not then, not ever.

Slowly, her breathing began to regulate. Cabal dared to glance over at her. She had rolled to face him, her countenance was relaxed, a delicate flush fading from her freckled cheeks. His eyes drifted down to the gentle swell of her chest, the locket dangling off to the side, leaving the skin just above and between her breasts exposed. _Stop that_. He told himself. He tore his eyes away from the rise and fall of her chest and instead examined the scars on his hands, counting them, resolutely not thinking about Miss Barrow’s breasts, or her mouth, half open in sleep. Not at all.

 

He did not trust himself to move for a long while. Hours, possibly. Not until his heart calmed and his internal clock reminded him that it _must_ be morning by now. Only then did he disturb himself, roll quietly into a crouch, and then begin to ready himself for the rest of their expedition. He checked his Gladstone and reloaded the Webley about three decibels louder than necessary, until he heard Leonie stir behind him.

She sighed, rolled onto her back, and he heard the soft sound of her running her fingers through her hair _. He’d dreamed about doing just that once and she had—_

He dared to turn and glance at her, fixing his face in what he hoped was cool disinterest. She had a bleary grimace on her lips as she rubbed her palm into her left eye to dislodge the sleep there.

He was eager to be on his way, eager to have an excuse to stop looking at her. Immediate threats to his life were helpful like that.

“We shall try the rightmost branch first.” She was still moving slowly, sleep-blurred and disoriented. If he were lucky, she wouldn’t even remember that she’d dreamed at all. And eventually, it would pass from his mind as well. The idea sounded feeble, even to him. He jerked his head in the desired direction and irritation flashed across her face.

“Give me one blessed minute, Cabal. I’m a single solid ache after that floor.”

 

Leonie Barrow stretched her back once, twice. Fixed her hair. She was exhausted. She. She wasn’t quite sure how she should feel about all that. It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamt about Cabal, that was certain, but it had been the most vivid in a long while. His fingers twitched slightly as she readied herself, and the wondered what offense she could possibly have caused already. Maybe her seams were out of line. She smiled to herself, shaking her head, if he was in the sort of mood where her seams irked him, there was no hope for a sedate journey home at all.

Cabal turned and made for the rightmost tunnel, scooping up his Gladstone bag as he went. Leonie picked herself up off the floor and followed, pretending that she wasn’t admiring the broad stretch of his shoulders, or how his hips moved when he walked. She shook herself, glad his back was to her. Those weren't safe thoughts at all; but she couldn’t help it if the impossible man lacked the wherewithal to notice that his jawline could kill, now could she?

Cabal turned to glance back at her, to ensure that she was indeed trotting along in his wake. She wasn’t fast enough to wipe her face completely clear, and instead met his quizzical eye with a tired half smile and a sarcastic wave of the hand.

“I’m coming, my boy, I’m coming. Don’t get your frillies in a knot.” He snorted, not deigning to respond.

A long, low moan echoed through the tunnel they both stopped in their tracks. The sound came from somewhere up ahead. It thrummed through their eardrums and set their teeth on edge. Leonie glanced warily at Cabal. Cabal returned the look with his usual emotional constipation.

He crept forward to the next turn, Webley in hand. Peeked around the corner. His entire body went very still.

Leonie poked her head up beside Cabal’s. She paused, staring at what lay in wait there.

“So.” She whispered, voice shaking, “the rightmost tunnel, eh?”

“It was the most logical idea at the time,” he said, “In retrospect, I should have considered the smell to be suspicious.”

They ran.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I made an AO3 account for the express purpose of posting this.


End file.
